EVENTS

No Till / GMO – 2

Looks like the little bastards have grown a couple inches. By the end of August they’ll be taller than I am, and any weeds growing between them won’t have a chance.

madonna and child

The deer are already hard at work, trying to eat the entire field.

2 years ago this mom deer had her baby in the treeline that shelters my house from the wind blowing across the fields (it’s a very traditional American farm layout c.a. 1805) and she was terribly thin so I put a bucket of corn and some carrots out for her. We often forget that in nature, a gestating animal is running a huge calorie deficit, and is one misstep away from death when they give birth. So I’m a soft touch and fed her, even though the next year she repaid me by eating my entire cilantro patch. “Thanks, Marcus! nom nom nom So much for your omlettes!” She was back this year with a new baby, and two adolescents in tow. I’m not going to try to get any closer to her. I did almost drive over the baby with my truck; it was napping in the tall grass and I cut off the driveway to go chase down some ATVers. The baby screamed so loudly I freaked out and spent a while running around checking to make sure there was no corpse.

I love pineapple and cilantro (seperately) but pineapples and mangoes sometimes give me bumps on my tongue. There’s some kind of acid or something in bananas and pineapples and mangoes (unfortunately) that I have bad reactions to..

Not to me. I loathe, hate and despise the stuff, but I get fooled over and over again. I whisper quietly to one of my daughters over the restaurant table – I think this meat might be off. Oh, mum! It’s coriander, surely you of all people can taste it.

I can taste or smell it quite clearly when people put it into vegetable dishes. But I’m (overly) sensitive to all the caraway-based flavours of various herbs and spices – caraway and coriander obviously, but also tarragon, fenugreek, cumin and several others. The smell or the taste might be “aromatic”, or soapy or off in some way, but distinctly unpleasant. Depending on how I am on any given day, I can also “over-react” to some of the anise linked flavours despite being a bit of a licorice addict.

I’ve learned to be super cautious when people tell me that a curry isn’t too hot so I should like it – it’s “aromatic”. Deadly word. I like chili and mustard and ginger and horseradish and most hot flavours. I just can’t stand curry or chili dishes made with cumin and it’s ugly smelling relatives.

Apparently the seeds – of most herbs and spices – have completely different chemical components, at least as far as flavour and smell type molecules. Nutmeg and mace are another example, nutmeg is the kernel, the mace comes from its hard casing.

I suppose that makes sense. There are plenty of plants where one or more parts are inedible or actively poisonous and only one is edible, sometimes needing processing to be safe. There are very few perennial plants, like trees, where all parts are edible. The moringa tree would be one, maybe the only one, I haven’t heard of any others.

I know that cilantro leaves and cilantro stems taste very different. Coriander root is a staple in rendang and other malay/thai dishes, whereas the leaves are used in laab. They taste really different.